Many businesses utilize telemarketing as a means of soliciting customers in order to promote or sell the company's products and/or services. Telephone solicitations have become such an annoyance to many telephone subscribers that at least one State, namely Georgia, has enacted legislation intended to prevent companies or individuals from contacting telephone subscribers who have been placed on a list, referred to as the "No Call List", maintained by the Georgia Public Service Department. A fee is charged to any telephone subscriber wanting to be registered on the list. Telephone solicitors are required to obtain the list and quarterly updates of registrants to the list and to pay an annual fee. If a telephone solicitor places a telephone call to anyone on the list, the telephone solicitor can be subjected to a fine.
One of the disadvantages of using the "No Call List" is that subscribers must pay a fee to be placed on the list in order to prevent telemarketers from contacting them. Currently, this fee is $5.00 per telephone number. Therefore, a financial burden is placed on the telephone subscriber in order for the telephone subscriber to avoid being bothered by unwanted telephone calls.
A service known as Caller-ID is now available which allows a party receiving a telephone call to visually review the telephone number and/or the identity of the calling party before deciding whether to accept the telephone call. However, Caller-ID has several disadvantages. First of all, when the subscriber receives a telephone call, the subscriber must visually review the caller's identity and/or the telephone number on the display of the Caller-ID device to determine whether he or she wishes to accept the telephone call. Therefore, the telephone rings regardless of whether or not the subscriber is interested in accepting the call, which interrupts the subscriber. Although the Caller-ID service does provide the subscriber with the option of blocking telephone calls, it does not provide for billing the calling party a fee in order to connect the calling part with the subscriber.
Secondly, many telephone calls show up on the Caller-ID display as "unknown" or "private" numbers, thereby preventing the subscriber from ascertaining the telephone number and/or identity of the calling party. Therefore, the subscriber often feels compelled to accept the call when this message is displayed even though the subscriber does not know the telephone number and/or the identity of the calling party.
Recently, a service known as "Privacy Manager", developed by Ameritech Corporation, solves some of the shortcomings of Caller-ID related to "unknown" and "private" numbers. Privacy Manager implements software which intercepts calls from "unknown", "private", "unavailable", "out-of-area" and "blocked" numbers which are directed to persons subscribing to the "Privacy Manager" service. The software then causes the caller to be asked to record his or her name and then provides that information to the subscriber. The subscriber then decides whether he or she wishes to accept the call. Therefore, the caller is not connected to the subscriber until the subscriber has indicated that he or she will accept the call. If the caller does not provide the caller's name, the software causes the call to be disconnected.
One of the disadvantages of Privacy Manager is that the telephone rings and the subscriber must then decide whether to accept the call. Therefore, even if the subscriber decides not to accept the call, the subscriber has been inconvenienced by the call Accordingly, a need exists for a method and apparatus that allows a subscriber to authorize certain callers to be connected to the subscriber and, on the other hand, which allows a subscriber to effectively block calls from unauthorized parties and/or selectively accept the unauthorized calls in exchange for some pecuniary benefit charged to the party initiating the call. In this way, a financial burden is not placed on the subscriber, but rather, is placed on the unauthorized caller. Furthermore, if the subscriber decides to accept an unauthorized call, the subscriber can, depending on how the fees are allocated, receive a portion of the fee charged to the telemarketer in return for being connected to the subscriber.